Was Gombrowicz the First Postsecularist?

Abstract

Abstract In this article, based on my recent book Gombrowicza milczenie o Bogu (Gombrowicz’s silence about God),1 I demonstrate the essence of Witold Gombrowicz’s singularity, as well as the paradox of his attitude with regard to religion. The subject is of interest insofar as the author often passed over it in silence, though it was crucial to his worldview—all the more so in that it allows us to speak of the originality of his thought. Gombrowicz liked to provoke; he would mention his innovation or even his genius, and he regarded himself as a “universal precursor,” who had come before postwar existentialism and structuralism. This was, of course, part of his strategy to spread his fame. The onetime “first of the Structuralists,” as he called himself in an interview with himself in 1967, would have doubtless applauded my attempts to paint him as the first “postsecularist.”